Cambridge, Massachusetts

After my ROFLCon panel yesterday, I was approached by a recent Cornell alumnus named Ashley Kirsner. She told me she'd spent a year writing an honors thesis to test whether feelings of connectedness "increase altruism toward outgroup members," and she used the 2008 dancing video to induce those feelings.

According to her data, watching my video makes people a little bit nicer to each other, and a little bit less racist. That is just about the best news I can possibly imagine. Thanks, science!

Her methods involved layers of deceit toward her test subjects, as I'm told psych experiments so often do. I won't describe the experiment or pretend to grasp the details, but you're welcome to try. Anyway, she says the results were favorably conclusive, but maybe she's lying to me too. For all I know, this is part of the experiment. No way to be sure.